quotations about poetry
One of the current great problems in the world is fundamentalism of every kind -- political, spiritual -- and poetry is an antidote to fundamentalism. Poetry is about the clarities that you find when you don't simplify. Poetry is about complexity, nuance, subtlety. Poems also create larger fields of possibility. The imagination is limitless, so even when a person is confronted with an unchangeable outer circumstance, one thing poems give you is the sense that there's always, still, a changeability, a malleability, of inner circumstance. That's the beginning of freedom.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"How can poems transform the world? A chat with poet Jane Hirshfield.", Washington Post, May 13, 2015
Good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it.
UMBERTO ECO
The Paris Review, summer 2008
A poet is a painter in his way, he draws to the life, but in another kind; we draw the nobler part, the soul and the mind; the pictures of the pen shall outlast those of the pencil, and even worlds themselves.
APHRA BEHN
Oroonoko
A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
OSCAR WILDE
"The Children of the Poets", Pall Mall Gazette, October 14, 1886
Poetry is the other way of using language.
HOWARD NEMEROV
Reflexions on Poetry & Politics
Much of the poetry we know about comes from our high school English classes where teachers turned to the 19th century for inspiration. While some of those poems are wonderful, quite a few are old-fashioned enough to sound obscure, and have contributed to the popular idea that poetry is unfathomable and not something meant for ordinary people. All of this is horse-twaddle, if you'll pardon my French. Poetry is for everyone, and here's how you can tell: whenever something big happens in the world or in an individual life, people turn toward it: Suddenly poems are flying around the internet, being shared, liked, and retweeted hundreds of times. Poems are read at weddings, christenings, and funerals, at opening ceremonies and presidential inaugurals. This is because poetry is the language of emotion.
MOLLY FISK
"Poetry Is All Yours", Women's Voices for Change, April 9, 2016
I hope that the feeling of making poetry is not confined to the people who write it down.... I am sure that the great glory of poetry in one's heart does not wait on achievement.
STELLA BENSON
This Is the End
The more serious poetry of the race has a philosophical structure of thought. It contains beliefs and conceptions in regard to the nature of man and the universe, God and the soul, fate and providence, suffering, evil and destiny. Great poetry always has, like the higher religion, a metaphysical content. It deals with the same august issues, experiences and conceptions as metaphysics or first philosophy.
JOSEPH ALEXANDER LEIGHTON
The Field of Philosophy
Babies are not brought by storks, and poets are not produced by workshops.
JAMES FENTON
Ronald Duncan Lecture, 1992
Away! away! I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy.
JOHN KEATS
"Ode to a Nightingale"
He that would earn the Poet's sacred name,
Must write for future as for present ages.
CHRISTOPHER PEARSE CRANCH
"The Poet"
Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realization to external sensuous material; instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings.
GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL
Introduction to Aesthetics
Certain events such as love, or a national calamity, or May, bring pressure to bear on the individual, and if the pressure is strong enough, something in the form of verse is bound to be squeezed out.
JOHN STEINBECK
The Paris Review, fall 1975
Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
letter to Ellen O'Leary, February 3, 1889
Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
JULIAN BARNES
Flaubert's Parrot
It might sound a little glib, but maybe I don't know what a finished poem is. I lean toward the school that a poem is never finished, it's just abandoned.
WALTER BARGEN
"An interview with Walter Bargen, first poet laureate of Missouri"
Because it thinks by music and image, by story and passion and voice, poetry can do what other forms of thinking cannot: approximate the actual flavor of life, in which subjective and objective become one, in which conceptual mind and the inexpressible presence of things become one.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry
The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.
T. S. ELIOT
Tradition and the Individual Talent
A small poet repeats himself like a clock.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Deprive poetry of this which it has in common with philosophy--the seeing of things as they are--and the beauty and fragrance of the flower are gone.
JOHN GRIER HIBBEN
The Problems of Philosophy